What is happening in Venezuela

Recent news about the situation in Venezuela:

(Washington, DC) – Venezuela’s humanitarian crisis is spilling across its borders, Human Rights Watch said today. Latin American governments need to apply strong pressure on the Maduro administration to address severe shortages of medicine and food in Venezuela that are causing Venezuelans to leave the country.

Venezuela’s health crisis is spilling over to neighboring Colombia, where the border town of Cucuta is struggling to provide the medical care increasingly unavailable in the socialist country. As a result, Cucuta’s main hospital has amassed a monumental amount of debt as it helps out the thousands of Venezuelan patients that arrive every year from across the border.

The last thing Susana Raffalli ever expected was to end up working back home in Venezuela. Over a three-decade career, Raffalli worked with desperately hungry people everywhere from tsunami-hit Indonesia to Pakistan to the refugee camps of southern Algeria. A nutritionist by training and humanitarian by calling, she participated in the Oxfam experts groups that brought statistical rigor to such emotionally charged terms as “hunger crisis” and “famine.” Now she’s back in Caracas, her home town, applying a lifetime’s expertise in a context that never ought to have called for it.

The Venezuelan government’s response to date has been woefully inadequate. Authorities deny the existence of a crisis. They have not articulated or implemented effective policies to alleviate it on their own, and have made only limited efforts to obtain international humanitarian assistance that could significantly bolster their own limited efforts.

It’s one thing to talk to people you’ve never met before who are suffering from hunger, and it’s a completely different thing when they are from your own family, as the BBC’s Vladimir Hernandez discovered when he returned to his native Venezuela to report on its failure to get food on people’s tables.

Beset by relentless hyperinflation, collapsing public services and increasingly dictatorial rule, Venezuela is at risk of becoming a failed state. The best hope for change lies with neighbouring countries, which must sustain pressure to find a solution.

The diagnosis of the Cáritas Venezuela foundation on hunger is compelling. In a monitoring carried out between October and December of 2016 in 25 parishes of the country, the institution of the Catholic church detected that the crisis has been installed slowly and has had an exacerbation in the last months.

95% of Venezuelan hospitals suffer serious failures in the supply of basic medicines and supplies. Unofficial sources estimate that the infant mortality rate in 2016 was 18.6 per 1,000 live births: the worst since 1999, the year that Hugo Chavez came to power. They are not just numbers: they are real stories, heartbreaking, reflecting the dimensions of a country’s tragedy.

Univision News has shared with Prodavinci a journalistic work in which six professional doctors narrate their experiences and offer their vision on the situation of public health in Venezuela. These interviews belong to chapter 4 of the report “Venezuela in critical condition”.

Investment in health fell by 62% in 2016, the hospital network has only 3% of the supplies it needs and the lack of medicines is estimated at at least 80%. That is the x-ray of Venezuela, the oil power. And this is the story of Jesus Enrique Rodríguez, one of the many victims of a failed system.